The upside of digital devices how to make your child more screen smart, literate, and emotionally intelligent

Praise for
The Upside of Digital Devices
“Dreiske’s strategies for linking literacy skills to screen content are ingenious and child-centered,
engaging young screen users as readers. In The Upside of Digital Devices, she conveys this important
work in ways that are dynamic, informed by years of research, and deeply applicable to us all.”
—Dr. John Cech, Director for the Center for
Children’s Literature and Culture, University of Florida

“I’ve seen Nicole’s simple yet powerful technique in action and know it works. As an antibullying speaker and expert, I witness the effect screens have on young minds every day, and this
book will save lives.”
—Jodee Blanco, anti-bullying expert and author of
The New York Times bestseller Please Stop Laughing At Me
“Nicole has restaged the light shining on the hidden dangers of technology and consumerism to
illuminate the smartest use of electronic devices, the new public health players in the 21st century.
She aptly and clearly shows us how to keep from hurting ourselves, our well-being, and our children,
by applying systematic principles of healthy screen use to our digital devices.”
—Dr. Nicholas Peneff, PhD,
President, Public Health & Safety, Inc.
“Nicole is the world’s leading expert on how kids can and should interact with media and screens
so that they bring their higher order thinking to bear. For every adult who’s wondered how to talk
with young children about digital devices, this is the book that will change the parenting paradigm
around screens.”
—Salim Ismail, founding Executive Director of
Singularity University, bestselling author of
Exponential Organizations, Chair of ExO Works,
and former Vice President of Yahoo!



The information presented herein represents the views of the author as of the date of publication. This book is presented for

informational purposes only. Due to the rate at which conditions change, the author reserves the right to alter and update her opinions at
any time. While every attempt has been made to verify the information in this book, the author does not assume any responsibility for
errors, inaccuracies, or omissions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
is available through the Library of Congress
© 2018 Nicole Dreiske
ISBN-13: 978-07573-2047-7 (Paperback)
ISBN-10: 07573-2047-3 (Paperback)
ISBN-13: 978-07573-2046-0 (ePub)
ISBN-10: 07573-2046-5 (ePub)
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission
of the publisher.
HCI, its logos, and marks are trademarks of Health Communications, Inc.
Publisher: Health Communications, Inc.
3201 S.W. 15th Street
Deerfield Beach, FL 33442–8190
Cover design by Larissa Hise Henoch
Interior design and formatting by Lawna Patterson Oldfield


To the thousands of children
who taught me to cherish
their humanity, insights,
and compassion.


Contents
Acknowledgments

Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1
Know What Your Kids Are Watching
Chapter 2
Watching and Talking Go Together
Chapter 3
Creating a Safe Environment to Talk
Chapter 4
How to Talk—Your Tone Matters
Chapter 5
Fun, Bad, Sad, Scary
Chapter 6
Screens Boost Literacy:
Plot, Character, Setting, and More
Chapter 7
Our Values, Our Screens
Chapter 8
Connecting Books and Movies
Chapter 9
Psychological Priming
Chapter 10
Mindful Viewing
Chapter 11
Short Films That Encourage Discussion
Chapter 12
Emotional Intelligence


Chapter 13

Increasing the Sphere of Interaction Around Screen Time
Chapter 14
Lessons Learned
Appendix
Endnotes


Acknowledgments
People around the world and around the block have contributed to this book and I owe thanks to
them all. Happily, this isn’t a fancy awards show and I won’t be driven offstage by a crescendo of
music, so here goes.
The first and deservedly most effusive thanks go to the incomparable Jodee Blanco who not only
brought this book to a fabulous publisher, HCI, but guided each step of the book’s vision. She’s an
inspiration and, although much younger and cuter than I, Jodee is the book’s “real mom.”
Right up there with Jodee in bringing these ideas to their full fruition is my immensely professional
“book doctor” Thomas Hauck, who was the first to create elegant order in the chaos of overwritten
chapters I sent him. He’s the best pilot a first-time author could have in flying and landing a
manuscript.
Bob and Usha Cunningham, Jamie and Anita Orlikoff, and Curt Matthews were my best book
angels along with my mom, who lent me her lovely lake house for writing. Christine Martin, Carol
Meyers, Pam Conant, Jennifer Brown, Kimberley McArthur, and John Cech were all in the supporting
choir. Thank you all for making it possible for me to work with Jodee and Thomas to finish this book
while running the International Children’s Media Center (ICMC)!
Jina Lee, bless you for your early and endless work on transcribing these ideas and for listening to
me put the Screen Smart concepts together step by step. Alex Granato, thank you for your long-ago
research on topics I wanted to include in the book. Thanks to my inveterate and patient first readers
and citation editors, Rocco Thompson and Christina Condei, who labored through constant subhead
shuffling to place citations and make meaning.
A special thanks to Doris and Howard Conant, two dear friends and great supporters of the arts
and social justice, who have passed on. Doris saw the merit of the book right away and told me to

“get a professional to work on it.” “I am a professional,” I said. “Yes, but the wrong kind,” Doris
responded. “Get someone who knows how to write a book.” So I did.
Because they’re mentioned so frequently, I want to thank Chloe and Charlie Dreiske, my niece and
nephew, along with tens of thousands of schoolchildren, teachers, and principals whose experiences
formed the foundations for screen talk and the Screen Smart approach.
Another shout-out goes to my dedicated and talented core ICMC staff, Michelle Zaladonis, Tess
Walker, and Alex Babbitt, who put up with my working remotely over a summer when we had six
festivals, a Global Girls residency, and twelve interns viewing eight hundred films.
Neither the book nor Screen Smart would have been possible without the help of Newton Minow
and the fine lawyers at Sidley Austin who worked on a pro bono basis for me to obtain the ICMC’s
nonprofit 501(c)3 status. Undying thanks also to the visionary Seabury Foundation, the wonderful
folks at the Polk Bros. Foundation, the T-Mobile Foundation, the Conant Family Foundation, and the


Dr. Scholl Foundation who supported the Screen Smart program in its crucial proof-of-concept years.
The final thanks must really go to the filmmakers whose work helps open so many young minds in
so many ways. You’re amazing, gifted, and caring, and I hope you make many more great films for
kids!
Movies really can make you smarter. Who knew?


Preface
In 1996, I screened the film The Wind in the Willows for 200 schoolchildren at Piper’s Alley
theater in Chicago. This latest version of the children’s classic featured many Monty Python alumni,
and the film’s director and star, Terry Jones, attended the packed event. About thirty minutes into the
show, a ten-year-old girl came out of the theater sobbing, followed by her teacher. Terry, the goodnatured father of two children, spent a good ten minutes talking to this little girl as she was crying.
Unfortunately, no soothing or reassurances worked—she simply kept sobbing.
So I took her to a quiet part of the theater, and asked her if she watched television at home. With a
little hiccupping sob, she said “No, we’re Orthodox. We don’t watch any screens at home.”
I responded gently, “Your teacher said you read the book, so why does the movie seem so scary?”

She said, “But when you read a book you have a choice about what’s in your mind, and when you
see a movie you have no choice at all.”
I wanted children to know that they have choices. They, like we, can choose what to “let in” to their
minds and how to process what they allow in.
That was a call to action for me. It became very clear that even children who are extremely bright
and who are avid readers can be vulnerable to screen content in ways that adults can’t anticipate or
mitigate. I wanted children to know that they have choices. They, like we, can choose what to “let in”
to their minds and how to process what they allow in. Right then, I decided it might be worthwhile to
turn the decades I had spent talking with children about movies into practical strategies that would
open the door to real adult-child dialogue about screen time.
I’m someone who’s watched thousands of films with children for over forty years. I started the
first juried, competitive film festival for children in the United States and got the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize it so that short-film winners of a children’s festival could
potentially compete for the Academy Awards. I’ve addressed the World Summit on Media for
Children and given more than one thousand workshops teaching children to watch movies with their
“minds awake,” during the Screen Smart program, a twelve-session residency taught in schools,
preschools, and social service agencies. In Screen Smart workshops, children learn how to engage
with screens as active participants, to notice what they’re feeling and experiencing as they’re
watching, and to process that knowledge for greater self-understanding and awareness. The technique,
effective on kids of all ages, didn’t develop overnight and wasn’t perfected in a laboratory. I’m not a
doctor or an academic, though their voices are represented here. I think you’ll be delightfully
surprised and inspired by some of what they have to say. I am an expert on listening to kids and
turning screen time into a rich and meaningful opportunity for growth.


When I was giving workshops for the National Association for the Education of Young Children
(NAEYC) at the group’s national conferences, I heard many parents voice concerns about their
inability to talk to their kids about what they were seeing on screens: TV, film, and online. Some
would ask questions during the presentations while others approached me after, seeking advice. The
same thing happened at children’s film festivals after parent chaperones heard me talking before each

screening to children about how to watch a screen with your “mind awake.” Wherever I went, I
encountered more frustrated parents looking for ways to get their children to open up about what they
were watching on TV, movies, and on the Internet.
I soon discovered it wasn’t only parents who were eager for information on the subject. The
Illinois Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics asked me to present at their annual
conference. They wanted scripts doctors could use with parents on mediating children’s screen
experiences. They also requested scripts for parents to help them talk with their little ones.
In 2007, I sat on a panel called Critical Viewing: The Game the Whole Family Can Play, chaired
by David Kleeman, then the president of the American Center for Children and Media. At the end of
the discussion, a parent in the audience stood up. She was emotional and sounded almost desperate.
“These are great ideas,” she said. “But where do we start, how do we start, especially when
they’re tiny?” It was a valid question because toddlers and preschool-aged children have limited
vocabularies and attention spans.
At that point, I shared some of the techniques I had developed for an illustrated children’s book,
TV Time at My House. My team and I had been testing the book in daycare centers and preschools for
the past few years. I also talked a bit about the methodology behind the techniques. The response was
electrifying. Another woman stood up and then another, wanting to know more.
We have the power to help children “prime” their minds before they start watching screens, and
approach media as they would a book, with an “awakened” critical mind
That’s why I wrote this book. We have the power to help children “prime” their minds before they
start watching screens, and approach media as they would a book, with an “awakened” critical mind,
looking for themes, characters, and plot. With this easy-to-read guide, I wanted to help parents,
teachers, counselors, and childcare providers engage their children, open lines of communication, and
lead their kids through the media minefield. This way, kids could learn for themselves how to make
safe, healthy choices. Perhaps through this book all of us can even leverage the astonishing power of
media to teach and inspire.


Introduction
Do you sometimes rely on digital media to occupy your child because you’ve had a deeply

draining day and need half an hour to catch your breath? Perhaps you were driving your preschooler
to an activity and you gave her your iPhone to have a little peace and quiet in the car. You’re aware
you shouldn’t be allowing your devices to become impromptu babysitters, but there are moments
where it seems there’s no other option. Listen to me: that doesn’t make you a bad parent. It simply
makes you a very human one.
I’m a realist. I understand the unrelenting demands on parents’ time. You’re pulled in a million
different directions, each one a priority. When you’re on the fly, you don’t always have the luxury of
being able to think through every situation. You do what any over-burdened, well-intentioned parent
does—you wing it. Most of us cope the best we can, juggling far too much, hoping we can get through
the day having protected our little ones.
Then there’s the guilt. Remember that old public service announcement campaign, “Do you know
where your children are?” It’s as if the slogan has shifted to, “Do you know what your child is doing
right now,” or more specifically, “what screen your child is using right now?” How often are we
bombarded with statistics about children and screen time? Experts on talk shows, blogs, websites,
books, and watchdog groups are continually warning already frightened parents that if you don’t
police the amount of time your child sits with a screen and what they’re watching, you’re negligent
and could be damaging your little one for life. You agonize. You lose sleep over it. You can only be
so many places at once. And what if your child is on a playdate at someone else’s house? You can
ask, but you can’t assume those parents will follow your guidelines in their home. Moreover, even if
they do, kids can be sneaky about screen choices. As they get older, if they want to watch something,
they’ll find a way to access it. The questions you have to consider—and I need you to be honest with
yourself here—are how much can you really control what your child is watching and why do we all
focus so much on this particular point?
You can’t be with your son or daughter 24/7 and you can’t successfully insulate them by enforcing
rigid or nuanced restrictions on screen activity. What about the content you approve? Sometimes
seemingly innocent programs can have a more negative affect on children than programs the experts
tell you to avoid entirely. I can’t tell you how many kids have told me that Lilo & Stitch gave them
nightmares, and that the horror movie they saw made them laugh because it was so “dumb.” Narrative
content is interpretive and subjective. There’s no way to predict how a child will react to something.
Yes, you can make an educated guess about your own child’s response, and there’s a lot of good info

out there to help guide you. Ultimately however, no matter how vigilant you are, policing your
children’s screen time takes a huge amount of effort and emotional energy. Unfortunately, in the long
run, it doesn’t really get the job done.
So what is the job? Is it primarily protection? If we’re trying to help our children develop twenty-


first century skills, is it enough to protect kids from screens by keeping them away from “harmful”
content and limiting their screen-time exposure? I’m not suggesting you let children watch or play
with screens all the time or watch anything they want, let alone watch randomly with older siblings.
But no one can simply protect a child from digital influences and call that preparing children for
success in the twenty-first century. To help our kids become “Screen Smart,” we’ve got to move
beyond protection into preparation.
To help our kids become “Screen Smart,” we’ve got to move beyond protection into preparation.
Here’s the great news. You can leave many of those concerns about policing and protection behind
because you already have many of the tools you need to help your child truly thrive in the digital
world. You’re just not using those tools in relation to screen time yet. So we’re going to start fresh,
by envisioning the relationship we want our children to have with screens, and then exploring the
opportunities within screen time to build that new and positive relationship.
Sure, we’ll look at how screen time is affecting us and our children. But we’ll start from a new
perspective. Instead of talking only about “what they watch, when they watch, how much they watch,”
we’ll start with the catalyst questions that I asked more than a thousand parents and teachers:
What would a great relationship with screens and technology look like?
Would you like your children to confide in you when they’ve been scared or confused or disturbed
or delighted by something they’ve seen on a screen?
Would you like your children to know and be able to communicate what they’re feeling and
thinking about what they’re watching?
Would you like your child to notice that character, plot, and setting aren’t just in books, they’re
also in movies, shows, and games?
The answers to these questions became a “wish list” that drove the development of the techniques
you’ll find in this book. It’s just a matter of deciding what we want out of screen time so we can

identify how it can best serve us and our young children.
Although the majority of my techniques are focused on children ages two to six, the basic
methodology works for all ages. The language for older children may be more sophisticated, but it’s
never too late to start learning healthy screen habits.
We’ll explore how screen time can become a powerful asset to boost your child’s intelligence and
social emotional learning. Instead of creating digital cocoons that divorce you from your children,
screen time can help you better understand and relate to them. And here’s a surprise: it all starts with
reading. Great screen-time experiences build on great reading experiences. You already know that
reading to children is one of the most important developmental activities you can undertake for a
child’s success.
Let me give you a little overview about what we’ll be doing together here, and I want you to know


that none of it will put unrealistic demands on your time. I’m simply going to help you polish some
parenting tools you already use, repurpose others, and show you some new techniques for teaching
your child how to engage with screens in a healthy way and dialogue with you about it. Up until now
you may have felt frustrated when you tried to talk to your child about their screen-time experiences.
You may have no idea how to get the dialogue started. Maybe when you ask them a question, they
offer a vague answer or go silent. We’re going to change that simply by making some small
adjustments in how you approach the conversation, the tone and cadence of your voice, and how to
properly frame a question to children so they’re comfortable enough to open up, and lots of other
subtle but powerful strategies. I’ll show you how to help your child develop her own internal filters
and controls while interacting with a screen. You’ll get tips on how to create a positive safe
environment for discussion about screen time; how to teach your child about plot, character, and
setting; fun and creative ways to build your child’s literacy acuity during screen time; how to improve
their vocabulary, ability to communicate, emotional intelligence, and higher-order thinking skills
through talking about what they’re watching, and much more.
I’ll also tell you some stories from my work in the field with kids and how they inspired the
techniques I’ll be showing you. These stories range from festivals to frontline classrooms and family
coaching. Some of the little ones you’ll meet in these pages will make you chuckle with their

remarkable wisdom and honesty. Others will make you appreciate your own children from a whole
new perspective. My purpose in including these stories is to reassure you that you’re not alone, that
every parent, no matter where they live, their economic or social status, religion or ethnicity, shares
these concerns about how screens are impacting our children’s futures. We are all committed to our
children, not only as their caregivers and protectors, but also as their mentors. Screens and digital
devices are here to stay. They’ll only become more ubiquitous, so we have to march forward with
intent, be ready, and get our families ready.
I’m confident you’ll not only enjoy mastering the techniques in this book, but, the more you read,
the more excited you’ll become about trying out all that you’re learning. You’ll soon realize that you
can teach your young child to be Screen Smart, and you’ll make wonderful memories while doing it.
You and your child are about to embark on a life-changing adventure together navigating the digital
landscape. I’ll provide the survival kit to make that adventure fun, easy, and rewarding. Let’s get
started!


Chapter 1

Know What Your
Kids Are Watching
If you have kids, at one time or another you’ve probably said this to a friend, relative, or teacher:
“Limiting TV isn’t the problem. I know the limits. But what do I talk about after they’ve seen the
show?”
Or this: “My husband and I can’t be everywhere and see everything they see. What do we say
when they get upset about something that we don’t even know about?”
Or perhaps you’ve said this: “I try to talk to my two littlest about what they’re watching, but they
don’t want to discuss it with me. What am I doing wrong? How do I get them to talk to me? What do I
say?”
Sound familiar? You’re not alone. What’s the problem? Is it that your kids are spending too much
time on screens? Maybe yes, maybe no. According to the Nielsen ratings, our youngest children (ages
two to five) spend twenty-eight to thirty-one hours a week—between fourteen hundred and sixteen

hundred hours a year—with their eyes glued to a screen, immersed in some form of visual content.1
While you may think that’s too much, the intent of this book is not to argue how many hours of
screen time your kids should have. That’s a decision for you as a parent, knowing your child and
balancing issues like family time, school, and recommendations of trusted advisors like pediatricians.
But it can’t be denied that this amount of screen time has a significant impact on parenting,
particularly when it comes to understanding and interacting with our children. If we don’t understand
how a child is responding to what they’re watching (or playing), then we don’t understand that child,
because they spend more time with screens than they do with any other activity outside of sleep.
If we don’t understand how a child is responding to what they’re watching (or playing), then we
don’t understand that child because they spend more time with screens than they do with any other
activity outside of sleep.
Developing a real understanding of your child’s responses during screen time takes skills that you
already have. When my niece was seven years old, she was watching reruns of Buffy the Vampire
Slayer with her thirteen-year-old brother and a couple of his friends in my mother’s study. I didn’t
know what they were watching, but after about twenty minutes she came out of the study with her little


brow furrowed, and said, “Auntie ’Cole, when I watch TV with the big kids, I get afraid for my
grown-up life.”
I had heard her laughing and giggling from the other room and assumed everything was fine. Was I
wrong! She needed to talk and she wanted someone to listen. So I stopped what I was doing and
walked with her to the porch. There, I started asking questions and listening to her answers.
“What were you watching?” I asked.
“Buffy, and there was killing and screaming. People were scared.”
“People in the show or people watching?
“People in the show.”
“So you get scared when the characters, the people in the show, are scared.”
She nodded, looking forlorn, and I leaned down and opened my arms.
“Would it help if you sat on my lap for a hug?” I offered.
After she nodded, I took her on my lap in the rocking chair, and we started rocking.

“So why do you think the characters in the show were scared?”
“Sometimes no one can help them,” said my niece.
“Wow, you’re right. It would be scary if no one could help you. But is that true, sweetie? Is it true
for you that no one can help you?”
“Sometimes at school. My teacher says I’m not smart and no one can help me.” Ouch! Here I had
to wait a beat and absorb what she had said.
“I see why you’re scared,” I said. “So I’m going to make you a promise. Any time there’s
something for school or anything else you need help with, I’ll help you. Or Grandma or Daddy or
Mommy will help you. We want to help. All you have to do is let us know, sweetie, can you do that?”
I’m truly grateful that she came to me and we were able to talk things out; otherwise, I can’t be
sure how it might have impacted her. My niece opened up to me because she felt comfortable. I paid
attention to my approach, tone, and tempo when drawing out the details of her experience, and I
genuinely cared about what she had to say.
Chloe’s story brings us to a topic that affects many parents. While this book provides many
techniques for young children, what do you do when there are big age differences between children
watching together? In some families, the access to tablets and smart phones has made this less of an
issue because the older children can play games or watch different content on their devices while the
younger ones watch age-appropriate content. But for times when the age differences between your
young digital natives may still pose a challenge, see special tips in Chapter 13.

Active Listening
So let’s look at the bigger picture of adult-child communications. It won’t surprise you to learn that
the best adult-child communications start with active listening, an accessible skill that turns you into a
super parent. Although it’s often associated with counseling and conflict resolution, it’s a skill every


parent needs. Plus, as a parent, with active listening you’re ahead of the game from the start because
you don’t need to take several sessions to learn the trigger points, temperament, and background of
your child, the way a therapist would with a client.
Active listening is a way of listening and responding that promotes shared understanding and

builds better relationships. It starts with the goal of truly understanding the feelings and ideas of the
child, something to which every parent aspires. How many times have we listened with “half an ear”
and assumed we know what the child is saying? Active listening replaces both those behaviors with a
simple strategy that will yield greater closeness and far more effective parent-child communication.
Active listening is a way of listening and responding that promotes shared understanding and builds
better relationships.
In active listening, you’ll want to:
Concentrate. Give the child your full attention.
Understand. Don’t assume you know; listen with an open mind.
Respond. While the child is speaking, nod and show your attentiveness, then respond verbally
once you’ve fully understood.
Remember, by tracking the course of the conversation, you demonstrate that you really were
listening, and your verbal responses will be more specific and effective. The reason it’s important to
concentrate and understand is so that responding can become a dynamic process. Some of the ways
you’ll respond will involve:
Summarizing
Questioning
Paraphrasing
Clarifying
I’ll include a list of books on active listening, and many of the scripts that I’ll include in this book
model these steps.2
There are many hidden benefits to active listening. For example, it conveys to our children that we
value what they say and that we value their opinions, even when those opinions may differ from our
own. This is a confidence-builder for children and encourages independent thought. In the “remember
and respond” phases, active listening also generates a free flow of ideas, not only facilitating
exchange and sharing, but allowing parents and children to appreciate the differences and connections
between their ideas. But first we need to be able to get our children to talk to us!


Be Interested in What Interests Them

We can start building the bridge to dialogue with our surly tweens and teens by showing interest in
the things that interest them when they’re young. Take their first digital journeys with them, not to
protect them but to enjoy the experience. If they happen to start My Very Hungry Caterpillar with a
friend instead of with you, get in and try it yourself and then talk to them! Find out what part of the
game they like the best and why. After they’ve played for a while, start the wheels of dialogue
spinning by asking them to talk first, pay more attention to what they’re seeing on the screen, and
second, reflect on the experience. Here, I often have the child on my lap holding the tablet.
“Why do we like playing this game so much?” The child may shrug, or say, “I like it!”
“So it’s fun? What makes it fun? Is it the sounds? The colors? The way the caterpillar or other
characters look?”
The next time she plays, I may or may not play with her from the beginning, but I’ll focus on
helping her get a little self-awareness going. In our dizzying digital world, it’s never too soon to
develop metacognition, the ability to reflect on our own thoughts.
“So how do you feel when you hear the bell (buzzer, music) get louder?”
“It’s pretty music.”
“I like it, too. What feeling does it give you when you hear it?”
“Happy.”
“Is that all? I see you wiggling when you hear the music. Why do you wiggle?”
This kind of interaction lets the child know that you’re interested in what they’re feeling, and that
knowing what they feel and how they’re responding is something you want to be part of. Also, these
kinds of conversations can go in many different directions depending on the context and conditions. If
you’re at the airport and your child is overtired, it may not be the best time to try for a deeper
dialogue. But it could also be a motherlode moment when your child starts talking a blue streak and
putting together ideas. Whatever the situation, always be prepared to say ELMO, “Enough, let’s move
on,” instead of forcing a discussion.

Include Them in Adult Conversations
Another way to fast track our children’s growth and development is simply to include them in adult
conversations. They may not be interested at the start, but parent attention is a pretty potent lure.
So when you’re discussing current events with your spouse at dinner or in the car, find ways to

include your child if those events are child appropriate. In general, topics such as murders, bombings,
wars, child abductions, or how much you hate the current administration are best discussed with other
adults. If the child asks you questions about “hot” topics, that’s something else entirely. Often,
questions about wars, killings, or extreme weather surface because a child is seeking comfort and


stability. Here, I’m looking at the best ways of using current events to involve children in grown-up
discourse. Neutral or good topics would include successful rescues, elections, budget crises, the
opening of a new zoo.
I generally recommend starting this at age four and up, but some children are verbal and interested
earlier. You invite inclusion by saying, “Do you know what we’re talking about, honey?” Just have a
simple synopsis ready to share, in case the child has no clue. For example, “We’re talking about the
president, do you know who that is?” Trust me, questions will follow, and the child will develop
confidence, curiosity, and an appetite for participating in adult conversation.
Children who’ve been included in adult discourse develop higher-order thinking skills much faster.
Children who’ve been included in adult discourse develop higher-order thinking skills much
faster. Here are a few quick examples:
An eight-year-old named James surprised me when I asked a class of second-grade students about
their experiences with nonfiction media. According to James, “We have to watch the world a
lot more closely now. It’s changing so fast.” James’s mom Roberta said that he’d been “part of
family talks about world news since he was in preschool.”
Ten-year-old Sabrina’s pediatrician had been close to her family since they had immigrated from
Mumbai. In one of my workshops, he recounted that “Sabrina sat at dinner with eight adults and
contributed to the conversation when we were talking about the effects of Reaganomics. It was
clear that she was considered an equal—not special or precocious—just on a par with the other
adults.”
When four-year-old Stacey’s parents began letting her ask questions during the 2016 election, they
let her form her own opinions. After watching part of a debate, and some opening talks, she
came to the conclusion that one of the male candidates for president was “a bully,” because of
“how he talks and makes mean faces.”

(The day after the election, she asked her parents the same question I was asked several times by
children in Chicago schools: “If bullies are bad, why did the bully win?”)
We need to bridge the gap between these spaces that we’ve reserved as adults-only to create
spaces where adults and children can converse together. When such conversations occur at random,
naturally and unforced, the payoff is incredible.

Why We Need Screen Talk
To bridge the gap and end screen-based segregation of adults and children, we also need to check
the emotional and energetic vibe we send out when we’re using screens ourselves. I’m not just talking
about television here. Picture the “don’t bother me” bubble you create around yourself when you’re


working on your phone. Not only do children mimic that self-created isolation, but it’s a natural
deterrent to starting to talk about screen use.
Cultural and generational experiences also contribute to the segregation of adults and children
during screen time. Baby boomers who resisted the old, “Do as I say, not as I do” discipline that
characterized a lot of parenting in the 1950s and ’60s wanted to do things differently when they
became parents.
Some tried to break down the harshness of parental barriers by allowing the permissiveness they
had craved and by becoming their children’s friends. Others who felt deprived of emotional support
may have overcompensated by becoming much vaunted “helicopter” parents who wanted oversight on
every childhood experience. I think we’ve all seen the fallout from that approach.
Family structures like chores and curfews got harder and harder to maintain. But freeing kids from
contributing to the family tends to backfire, by elevating resentments on both sides. A couple of
decades down the road the kids who were your “friends” can’t do anything for themselves and expect
you to do it for them.
We’re not just segregated from our children by the ways we use screens. The way the media
portrays parents and children on popular networks contributed to the parent-child divide. In many
popular sitcoms and movies, parents and adults were (and still are) portrayed as foolish or bumbling,
while children were portrayed as clever and mouthy. The adult was often shown as impeding the

child’s growth and creativity and initiative. It seems so benign compared to rampant pornography or
graphic special effects that show body parts exploding across a screen, and yet the myth of the
ineffectual parent is one of our most toxic twenty-first century cultural legacies.
Current conventional wisdom in parenting encourages balancing screen time with real-time
activities like art-making, sports, a walk in the park, or going to the zoo. That’s a great first step!
Many parents who are aware of the seduction of screens work hard at providing their children with a
full range of sensory play and creative and family experiences where they interact outside of screen
time. But that strategy effectively segregates screen time from normal family interaction, from
communication and laughter and shared experience.
Long term, the segregation of screen time from “real-life activities” is both counterproductive and
truly wasteful. That’s because the process of making screen time a multisensory, interactive pursuit is
not difficult and yields such extraordinary results. I think one problem that parents may face when
envisioning “screen talk” or “interacting with screens together” is that we’ve been assigned the jobs
of censoring, selecting, and supervising children’s screen time for too long. For seventy-plus years
parents have been put in the unenviable position of creating safe-media prisons as a means of
protecting our children. Who wants to be a prison warden in their own home?
So preparing children rather than merely protecting them is a very attractive and sensible
alternative.
That approach has long since been proven to be flawed because of children’s great aptitude in


accessing content when they are outside the family home and their great facility for circumventing the
kinds of electronic controls that are put into place for anything from the Internet to movies. So
preparing children rather than merely protecting them is a very attractive and sensible alternative.
Because sooner or later they’re going to exit the protective bubble, and the ability to process and
select their own screen experiences are invaluable twenty-first century skills.
Let’s look at these things: the V-chip, apps to track children’s screen use, complete parental
censorship and avoidance of disturbing material, limiting time spent with screens to an hour a day,
and making sure that all extended family and friends observe the same limitations. Even if you were
100 percent successful with that, at the end of the day, you have children who still have never talked

about their screen-time experiences and who don’t know how to process confusing or disturbing
content. They are still out of touch with the thoughts and feelings that screen content inspires, and they
are still spending far too much time with only one side of their brains. The end game for complete
success of all parental controls is obedience and overprotection. The end game for what I’m
suggesting is creative, independent thinkers who can select the media that is most appropriate for
them, question it, and then discuss it with others and have rational, intelligent discourse about the
most powerful influences in their lives.
Parents would have to go to extraordinary lengths to achieve 100 percent success in protecting
their children, ensuring that they stay safely in their media prisons, and enforcing obedience in
viewing choices. Using that same time and energy to develop a relationship with your child around
screen time has a far more meaningful outcome and is a much better investment of your time in that
child’s future.
Screen talk also builds, rather than stresses, family bonds, and the opportunities are endless when
you consider the sheer volume of children’s viewing hours. Remember those 1,400 to 1,600 hours?
Of course, that figure only increases in a child’s later years with elevated time on phones, Facebook,
Instagram, etc.
I said it before, but it’s a question that bears repeating: if your child is engaging in any activity for
1,600 hours a year, and you don’t know what your child is thinking and feeling about that experience,
how well do you know your child? Even if those 1,600 hours are divided between different kinds of
screens, spending that much time viewing without communicating, reflecting, or processing means that
media is a one-way street for little ones. Everything goes in and nothing comes out, so pressure builds
up in the mind. Talking, thinking, processing, and reflecting help relieve that pressure.
The joys of screen talk aren’t limited to children. When a group of adults watches a film and then
talks about it together, the experience can be transformative. They’re sharing very different ideas,
they’re learning about things they had no idea their peers thought, and they’re observing that other
people had a completely different experience from the one that they had. So when I started giving
professional development workshops for teachers in the 1990s, I was stunned when 80 to 90 percent
of educators said that they had never talked about a film with other adults. Listening to movie experts
talk about films can be enlightening and entertaining, and the Turner Classic Movies channel has
tapped into a real niche with its informative pre- and post-screening talks. But actually discussing

your own ideas and insights with a small group can be a revelation. As one teacher in an International
Baccalaureate school said, “Talking about movies taught me about myself and how I respond. If I
hadn’t talked about my own reactions, I wouldn’t have realized that so much was happening in my
own mind while I was watching.”
Screen talk opens your and your child’s mind to new layers of meaning within that content. The
ability to make meaning from what we experience is one of our most crucial twenty-first century
skills.
Screen talk opens your and your child’s mind to new layers of meaning within that content. The
ability to make meaning from what we experience is one of our most crucial twenty-first century
skills. By not including that as part of education, and as part of family experience, we’re not only
wasting opportunities, we’re also closing doors that need to stay open if we are to have a healthy
relationship with screens moving forward. Pediatricians agree!3


Chapter 2

Watching and Talking
Go Together
The first question many parents ask is, “When is the best time to talk to my child about what he or
she is watching?” The answer is, “At the moment they’re watching the movie!” That’s right: watching
and talking go hand in hand.
Collective family discussions aren’t necessary every time your child watches a screen. Several
times a week are enough! That way there will be enough interactive, parent-bonding experiences
around screen time to help children overcome the expectation of being alone with their screens. Of
course, this is going to play out differently depending on the child’s age, temperament, and
preferences, including whether the child is introverted or extroverted. But this idea of talking to your
children around screens is like a perfect gift that’s never been unwrapped.
The optimum age to start screen talk is based on your child’s verbal and emotional development.

You’re the gateway to healthy screen habits, and to teach those your child has to be verbal and mature
enough to listen and respond. Short answer: you start screen talk at the age when your child can
communicate verbally and you allow her to look at screens.

Talk During the Movie
(Is That a Thing?)
To get the ball rolling, it’s beneficial over the course of a week to watch a few short programs
with your child, encouraging dialogue with open-ended questions during viewing. I’ll provide
several examples of the kinds of questions I use with children later in this chapter.
I can hear you screaming, “But I just got Angie to sit still and watch a whole feature film in a
theater without talking!” Don’t worry—you won’t erase all your earlier efforts to get your child to
watch movies in relative silence. You can simply divide movie viewing into two categories by
saying, “Sometimes we talk during the movie and sometimes we wait to talk. Today we’re going to . .
.”
But while you’re working hard to teach your child the many benefits of sitting still and being quiet,
please know that watching anything that’s seventy- to ninety-minutes long is the opposite of what


children ages two to six need developmentally, physically, and intellectually. I’m all for selfregulation, but if I’m watching a feature film with a very young child the best possible thing would be
to get the child talking while she’s watching it. Especially if the movie shows things that are the
opposite of all of the other developmental and family values we’re trying to impart.
In workshops, parents often tell me that they want to start a conversation with their children, but
they don’t know how. When they discover how much fun it is and how easy it is, they’re sometimes
puzzled about why they didn’t make the connection before. Not to worry! Baby boomer and Gen X
and millennial parents may have grown up with different screens and have had different formative
experiences with technology, but we’re all the same in one respect: no one ever talked to us about our
screen experiences, so it doesn’t occur to most of us to include screens in family dialogue.
Even when parents recognize that the stories on screens and the stories in books have a lot in
common, it doesn’t quite feel natural to start talking because there are layers of learned behaviors
around screens that take precedence.

From the 1940s through the 1980s, people sat with television sets, and if you talked during TV
time, Dad would yell at you. If Mom’s on her cell phone, you don’t bother her. You’re supposed to be
quiet in a movie theater. Art-house cinemas are sometimes quieter than libraries! So don’t blame
yourself if you haven’t been talking to your kids about or during screen time. Often, our culture and
behavioral patterning hasn’t fully supported “screen talk” before now.
One of the finest educators I know, Dr. Emilye Hunter-Fields, contradicted that. “Nicole, you need
to go down to the South Side movie theaters in Chicago and sit with some African-American
audiences. Our folks talk back to the screen and react verbally to foreshadowing. They’ll tell that fool
to move out of the way, or warn that girl to leave some no-good criminal.”
When traveling through parts of North Africa and South America, I noticed the same thing. People
from many different cultures talked to the screen in public while a film was playing. I found it
refreshing, although I could certainly understand why other moviegoers may have found it annoying.
Watching films at home with scores of different families, I noticed great differences in screen-time
behavior and interactions. Some families “shush” each other and generally prefer silence during
screen time, while in other families, adults spoke to or about characters on the screen during the
program. Some of these differences were due to the quality of the program or the general level of
focus and attention in the room. But denouements, “big reveals,” and moments of high drama or
emotion generally commanded greater silence around the screen, often followed by verbal or
nonverbal responses. Interestingly, more than 80 percent of the young people I’ve interviewed tell me
that they “yell at the screen” when the story is overly predictable or characters are TSTL (Too Stupid
To Live). So the “code of silence” may not be as hard to break as we think.
In 2013, at Walt Disney Magnet School, a highly regarded school on Chicago’s North Side, I was
approached by a parent after the screening we usually hold for families at the end of the Screen Smart
program. She had watched the children do the priming exercise and had seen the excitement that they
brought both to viewing and to discussing a) what was on the screen, and b) their responses to it. Her
first words to me were, “I wanted to meet the person who ruined my daughter for watching feature


films.”
She had been very pleased when she had finally trained her four-year-old daughter to sit still for

the ninety- to one-hundred twenty minutes required to view a feature film. I do not doubt that that is a
skill, and I sincerely applauded the mother for having taught her daughter so successfully. I hasten to
add that in a public theater viewing of any feature film, the skill of sitting still and watching will be
much appreciated by the parents and children close to you. But every screen context is different, and
viewing at home affords numerous opportunities for enriching the child’s understanding of what can
happen during screen time. Those same opportunities don’t exist in most public spaces, nor am I
recommending that you undertake all of the techniques I’m offering in this book in those contexts.
I told this very alert and supportive parent that the process of engaging a child in ways that will
encourage her to think independently and creatively starts in early childhood. And if the activity that
they spend more time with than any other activity outside of sleep involves screens, it may be in the
child’s best interest to develop the fullest possible complement of awareness, thoughts, structures,
categories, and communications about screen content with people whom they love and trust.
Positioning screen time as a rarified, energized, intimate activity in which children can explore
stories and their own minds will make screen time truly magical.
Having them sit silently while watching screen content empowers the creators (and sellers) of
that content. It accords the creators of that content greater importance than we, the audience, and
places the content itself above the child. That creates a lifelong tendency, as I said in the last chapter,
to follow rather than lead, and to honor the creative output of media makers over their own potential
creative expression. In early childhood when formative experiences carry so much weight, we want
to start the child’s relationship with screens with experiences that allow them to infer and learn that
we are superior to and in charge of the technology we use. Technology and screen content exist to
serve us, not drive or dominate us. The understanding that “what happens in your mind is as important
as what happens on the screen” will serve our children well as they move forward in a world
populated by artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR).
The mom and I parted on excellent terms and what she said was, “Wow, so watching screens can
be like taking them to the library.”
Here, I am not suggesting that parents replace trips to the library with screen time. Although, in the
1970s and 1980s, I confess to agreeing with Groucho Marx when he said, “I find television very
educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.”
Still, enriching screen time with the story-infused approach of library time is a fantastic recipe for

building neural networks and communication skills. Screen time is not a substitute for trips to the
library, or for reading aloud to a child and encouraging her to read on her own. But whether you’re
watching a YouTube video together or guiding your child through a new app, you can use digital
devices in the same way that you would use story time: to build trust, emotional intelligence, literacy,
and communication skills. In this way, screen time can become a dynamic “whole child” growth agent
that will leaven your child’s learning the same way that yeast causes bread to rise.